As the year draws to a close, the posts you’ll see here will be mostly based on old pictures.

My brother Mike last week passed along some old family pictures. Many of them I had never seen before.

Here’s a picture of my dad, Henry Neil Murphy (b. 1927 d. 1994), with his dad, Michael Henry Murphy (b. 1893 d. 1951). I’m guessing that dad is around 20 years old, so this would be around 1947. Note that they’re both smoking. My dad smoked a pipe for most of his life. I can only remember a couple of times seeing him smoke a cigarette. My grandfather was a lifelong smoker. My mother recalled that my grandfather smoked unfiltered cigarettes and had a permanent tobacco stain between the first two fingers of his right hand. My grandfather Murphy died just two months after my oldest brother, Brian, was born.

It’s kind of funny reading about the athletes that attended Power Memorial. I don’t remember dad being much of an athlete, but then he was in his early forties when I was in my early teens, and he had a bad back by then.

Well, here’s a picture of dad at bat in a game of stickball. Kind of reinforces what I was saying about dad as an athlete, right? Maybe back then the normal stickball attire was slacks and a dress shirt?